NZ Christchurch shooter illustrates the evils of white nationalism

The terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing forty-nine and wounding many others, illustrates once again as if we needed a new example, of the horrors that extremist hatred can perpetrate.

The murderer, who will only be referred to in this article with terms of disparagement and not by name, has been captured by police officers who forced him off the road and dragged him from his vehicle at gunpoint—and several others have been detained as suspects.

This attack brings to New Zealand a reality that we in American have been experiencing, namely the rise of terror from the far right and far left, an ideology that seeks to wall off “white culture” from contact with people perceived as the Other.

In a manifesto to explain what he was about to do, he quotes the white supremacist slogan called the Fourteen Words, “We must secure an existence for our people and a future for white children,” a Freudian slip that reveals the desperate fear that he and his ideological fellows feel. This rallying cry is an expression of weakness, a belief that “whiteness” is something so fragile that the slightest mixing will shatter it.